Many electronic design automation (EDA) engines such as circuit simulators and design comparison tools produce textual log files and other output reports that, in this description are generally referred to as log files for convenience. These log files may contain references among the text to various design objects, tool options, and other text files, along with various corresponding error messages and warnings. The log files may be very large in size for a typical modern circuit design, to the point that reading and processing a complete log file may be computationally expensive.
The current state of the art for viewing a log file in an EDA framework is often limited to merely showing a circuit designer the log file in a plain text file viewer. As a result, the circuit designer using such a plain text file viewer is generally unable to interact with the rest of the EDA environment interface in an effective, coordinated manner. It is generally incumbent upon the user to read and manually parse the text file, and to mentally map the objects referred to within the text to other objects within the circuit design.
Thus there is a need for an improved approach to managing electronic design automation (EDA) output log files and the relevant design data they contain. Accordingly, the inventors have developed a novel way to help circuit designers review data in log files and thereby more intuitively relate that information to other aspects of a circuit design.